Thursday, 19 December 2013

This is a final version. I've changed it after catching up with lots of films over the New Year and remembering some of the films I'd seen early in the year. Notable films I still haven’t seen are The Selfish Giant, Before Midnight, Gloria and Short term 12.

I’ve watched (or re-watched) well over 200 films this year,
including around 80 Hindi films. As far as new discoveries are concerned I’d
urge everyone to watch Wenders’ Pina,
Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake, Satyajit Ray’s Goddess and The Big City, Peckinpah’s
Ride the High Country and Cimino’s Heaven’s
Gate. Watching Elem Klimov's Come and See for the first time was revelatory and probably my cinematic moment of the year.I continue tocatch up on classics included in Mark
Cousin’s The Story of Film and have
Simon to thank for Samurai Rebellion and
Harakiri.

If you wanted to get into Bollywood (and Indian parallel
cinema) I’d go for Kahaani, Mirch Masala, Mandi and Debaang – that
would give any cinephile a real insight into the range of pleasures to be
found.

It has been another good year. My Top 5 in a Sight and Sound stylee would be:

[Remembering A: It’s always hard to choose, mainly because I
only get to see most of the films once and B: I should never judge a film on
one viewing – I’m far too easily seduced!]

·Beyond
the Hills

·The Act
of Killing

·Stories
We Tell

·Upstream Colour

·Neighbouring
Sounds

Five great films in any year and by any standard.

Naffest? I don’t go
and see everything anymore but The
World’s End was diabolical. LOL. I think I saw all the blockbusters and will be happy enough if I never have to watch any of them again though seeing Pacific Rim with Andy was quite fun.

Some of you might think that is all too boring (shame on
you), so….

A Top Twelve (ten was too hard)

The Act of Killing

Beyond the Hills

Upstream Colour

Neighbouring Sounds

Stories We Tell

The Great Beauty

In the Fog

Nebraska

Lore

Blue is the Warmest Colour

Wadjda

Blue Jasmine

I still need to watch A Field in England and Computer Chess again - weird in the best
possible, mind-bending,thought-provoking way. Less weird but certainly beautiful, mysterious and elusive is Pat Collins's Silence. Any of these could easily nudge into that top twelve.

It was a REALLY good year for women and women’s roles. Sakia
Rosendahl was sensational in Cate Shortland’s Lore as wereCosmina StratanandCristina Flutur in Beyond the Hills andAdèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in Blue is the Warmest Colour. I loved Blue Jasmine AND Frances Ha – Cate Blanchett and Greta Gerwig were just amazing. Everyone should watchWadjda and Philomena too. Admittedly I don’t see much TV these
days – only box sets – but Jane Campion’s Top
of the Lake was weird, exciting, dark and very cinematic – I LOVED it –
even better than The Bridge!

Other films in or around that top twelve would be I Wish, Gravity, Django Unchained and For Ellen. American
Hustle slid into 2014.

Good documentaries included Mea Maxima Culpa, Pussy
Riot: A Punk Prayer and Diaz – Don’t
Clean Up this Mess though nothingcould
match The Act of Killing or Stories We Tell.University Rev socs and film societies should be joining forces to
show all of these in the new year. There are lots
more to catch up on, on DVD.

Alan Partridge: Alpha
Papa made me laugh more than anything else by a long way. Sorry, but it
did!

Really good Hollywood efforts: The Place Beyond the Pines, Mud,
The Great Gatsby, Captain Philips, Prisoners, Much Ado About Nothing, Arbitrage and Stoker. I’ll include The
Way, Way Back even though it was marred by some moments of dumb, gratuitous
sexism – HUGE pity, but even so I could watch Sam Rockwell FOR EVER. And, I'll whisper this, as exploitative as it is, Spring Breakers is actually a lot more interesting than I could have imagined.

Really good World Cinema efforts include Pablo Larrain's No, Ozon's In the House, Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love, I'm So Excited and Something in the Air

Obvious one I’ve missed out: Only God Forgives. I’ve already written about it on this blog.
Everyone should watch it but I need to see it again.

Would a Bollywood movie feature in a Top 10? Difficult question as there
are lots of 2013 movies I haven’t seen, but I really enjoyed the verve (and
madness) of Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola and
the quiet beauty of Lootera. I’ll be
able to judge better next year when my brain has processed all the new
knowledge a little more.

Thursday, 28 November 2013

1977 was an unremarkable year for film. Admittedly it was
the year of Star Wars and Close Encounters when Hollywood was
beginning to cotton on to the power of the Blockbuster but otherwise there is
little to get excited about. The era of the great American political movies was
drawing to an end though auteurs like Scorsese (New York, New York), Lynch (Eraserhead)
and Scott (The Duelists) were
emerging.

Some great enduring films were still made: Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire; Ray’s The Chess Players, Allen’s Annie Hall and Herzog’s Stroszek are all classics but this was
clearly a year of transformation and change.

But has that got anything to do with Parvarish, one of the great Amitabh Bachchan masalas?

Nothing whatsoever!

Indeed if I had to compare it with anything else made in
1977 it would have to be with The Spy
Who Loved me, an absurd Bond by any standards; but even that would be doing
Parvarish a huge disservice. If I’ve
learned anything these past months it’s that you just can’t judge Bollywood
films by Hollywood (or European) standards.

Made in the same few years as Zanjeer (1973), Sholay
and Deewar (1975), Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), Don (1978) and Naseeb (1981), Parvarish
is, like all of those great films, an entertainment first and foremost.

Inspector Shamsher Singh (Shammi Kapoor) has encircled the
bandit Mangal Singh (Amjad Khan) at his home just as his wife gives birth to a
son, Amit. Some of the gang, included his brother, escape but Singh is
captured. The dying wife gives up their son to the care of the inspector who
takes him home to be cared for along with his own son Kishan.

Eight years pass and we learn that Kishan is becoming the
naughty one whilst Amit is well behaved. Mangal Singh is released from jail and
comes to reclaim his son. The Inspector refuses but Kishan accidentally comes
to believe that he is the son of the bandit.

Jump ahead again and Amit (Amitabh Bachchan) is a police
inspector himself whilst Kishan (Vinod Khanna), seemingly a teacher in a school
for the blind, is actually central to Mangal Singh’s criminal gang. Now the
film really begins.

Actually this is all familiar stuff – children separated
from parents; mistaken identity; one brother a cop and the other a criminal -
national duty v familial duty; nature v nurture; criminality and corruption as
the reason for society’s inequities (though the police come out remarkably well
in this one). So what makes it better than many other films of its type and
era?

Bachchan and Khanna are at the top of their game as great
action heroes but are funny and charismatic too, and the action (apart from the
hilarious submarines) is, for a 70s masala, fairly slick; as is the editing.
What elevates the film (into Seeta aur
Geeta territory) is Neetu Singh and Shabana Azmi as sisters Neeto and
Shabbo. They are skilled thieves and pick pockets, who become mixed up in the
lives of Amit and Kishan. Ostensibly the ‘love interest’ they get the best
lines, the best songs and easily steal the show. Indeed, the film loses some of
its allure in the second half when they get less screen time and thus less of
their exuberant charm and personality.

Here lies one of the most interesting issues in Bollywood
film. We know that the male stars drive the industry and get paid far more than
the female stars (5 to 10 times more usually) and that they are lionised in
Indian society. We also know that, just like any other popular romantic cinema
throughout its history, Hindi movies rest, rely and thrive on the magnetism and
sex appeal of their female stars as well as that insubstantial mysterious
quality, desire. Yet reading reviews,
gossip columns and blogs it’s almost as though this obvious reality is hidden
or blurred - that Indian society (?) can’t admit to the centrality of women and
that the best films undoubtedly have the more interesting female characters.

Of course sensuality and eroticism are as central to cinema
as light and shade. Even when the camera hasn’t objectified and gazed longingly
at the female form (and the male form), desire lurks everywhere in the history
of film. Desire, conceptually insubstantial as it is, IS different from
objectification of women in films and from the sexism prevalent throughout the
film industry. Texts are both about desire AND generate desire in the viewer,
and though this can arguably said of all texts – literature (Deleuze and
Guattari’s famously called literary texts “machines of desire”), art, music,
theatre – cinematic texts are especially complicated in this regard. Lacan’s
identification of the “ ’paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric, even
scandalous character’ of desire” gives one a sense of that complexity.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy to separate out desire from
sexual objectification – not at all - so to begin with I’ll concentrate on the
more tangible aspects of sexism and objectification. Recent studies
show the remarkable inequality in Hollywood films. Exact facts and figures are
harder to find for Bollywood but all the evidence points to even worse
statistics. Women have fewer roles, less screen time; they are more likely represent
sexist stereotypes and so on. The movie business echoes and perpetuates the
structural sexism throughout Western society. This is unequivocally the same in
Bollywood. Objectification and the male gaze is a different aspect of this
sexism and you only have to watch a couple of recent item numbers to realise
that sexual objectification of women is a key part of contemporary Hindi films.
Studies based on qualitative content analysis back up that impression.

A few critics have
raised a different question. Does Indian cinema require a more flexible,
nuanced critical framework from the seminal work done in feminist film
criticism by Laura Mulvey and her successors? They did after all base their
work on Hollywood films. In Hollywood the male gaze and the objectified
representation of women can be astoundingly obvious and gratuitous (Transformers) or slightly less so (Leaving Las Vegas) but often we are so
inured to it that it is only those more obvious ones we pick out for criticism.
That doesn’t mean that it isn’t still much more prevalent than cinephiles would
perhaps like to admit. Common sense (and my impression after watching 70
Bollywood films) would suggest Bollywood is no different – and probably worse.
Nonetheless those dissenting critics ask if there is perhaps a different
‘Indian culture of looking’ that is not, still, mainly concerned with
objectifying women. It’s a more
reasonable and interesting question than one might imagine. Western cinema, has
throughout its history, been based on realism and thus there is a voyeuristic
element to watching other people’s ‘real’ lives play out. Indian cinema is melodramatic
in form and thus far more concerned with performance. The ludicrous fight
sequences, the breaks in continuity and the song and dance numbers make it
clear that the movie you are watching is not realistic in the same way The Godfather is. Could this really make
a difference to the dynamics of gaze and the interpretation of images?

Anyway, going back to Parvarish
for a minute, it’s completely unsurprising that virtually all Hindi films,
unlike Hollywood movies, rely on their (young) female stars. Indian audiences
expect a bit of everything in their films–there has to be elements of romance
or family drama even in an action film just as there has to be music. Whereas
there are MANY great popular Western films that hardly feature women at all – The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Cool Hand
Luke, The Great Escape, The Seven
Samurai, The Wild Bunch. So many indeed that we have to complain about a
lack of interesting female roles again and again.

This makes life very interesting for any analysis of women’s
role in Indian films. You might imagine a fairly simple dichotomy between films
that offer up sexist stereotypes or glamorised pin-ups and those that offer more
interesting female characters – or at least a clearly delineated spectrum. Another
theory might suggest that all women’s roles are corrupted by the oppressive
sexual politics and chauvinistic attitudes prevalent throughout Indian society.

Neither alternative seems correct however. I
wonder instead if there’s something unique to the masala mix that changes the
equation in a more fundamental way. This isn’t to suggest that most Hindi films
don’t incorporate various varieties of sexism and crude stereotype, or that
they don’t objectify women - they do. This
is tricky territory as I don’t want to fall in to any form of Orientalism. Nonetheless
It’s one thing to embrace the differences between Bollywood and Hollywood and
the differences in audience expectation and quite another to feel like I’m
excusing sexism in Hindi films in any way. Thus my feeling is that Hindi films
don’t require a more sophisticated critical framework for analysing the male gaze
– but I’m going to do some more reading and get back to you. Rather I wonder if
Hindi films do something unique with sensuality and with desire - though I’m perfectly
willing to accept, for now anyway, that has more to do with my new found
fascination for Bollywood.

Friday, 15 November 2013

With over 60 Hindi
films under my belt, I’ve decided I can let some of my thoughts out. Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, released in
May 2013, has been a huge financial success in India and around the world.
Running time is 159 minutes and within that are 9 songs lasting nearly 39
minutes. That’s 120 minutes of dialogue – comparable to most modern Hollywood
films. The plot, for what it’s worth, is very simple: boy goes on holiday – boy
leaves home for college abroad - boy sees the world - boy comes home and finds
love. College friends, Bunny (Ranbir Kapoor), Avi (Aditya Roy Kapur) and Aditi
(Kalki Koechlin), take a trip to the Himalayas with a nerdy (but beautiful)
newcomer Naina (Deepika Padukone). The young men are confident flirts and flirt
with a succession of beautiful young women. Even so, it’s clear that Aditi is
secretly in love with Avi and, as the holiday continues Naina is falling for
Bunny.

Kapoor, is not the
most handsome leading man of his generation (see Shahid Kappor and Ranveer Singh), but as Bunny he is charismatic, confident and
self-assured playing the young man determined to seek out adventure and see the
world. You can see why he’s becoming
such a big star. Padukone is charismatic AND drop-dead gorgeous; you easily
believe the convention of the shy girl starting to trust herself and becoming
increasingly confident. The characters are quickly established, the dialogue is
slick and smart; the production values high.

The first half
comes to an end with the revelation that Bunny is moving to the States to study
journalism. The second half begins with an extended musical montage of Bunny’s
adventures across the world. He is clearly enjoying himself and living his
dream. The short section ends with Bunny receiving the news that Aditi is
getting married and wants Bunny to come home for her wedding. The slightly longer
second half, filled with great songs, focuses on events around the wedding.

The film is
conservative in myriad ways. All its characters are solidly middle class or
petite bourgeois – no call centre workers or waitresses here nor any glimpse of
poverty, hardship or oppressive traditions. If the importance of family is
forgotten in the first half then the film reasserts its importance and
centrality slowly throughout the second half. These modern films have increasingly rich production values and are often a little more 'Hollywood' than similar films from twenty (or even ten) years ago - no dream
sequences, no loss of continuity and a lot less cheese. The song and dance numbers, however DO
serve to move the plot forward, DO come at moments of emotional tension OR are
fitted in on the dance floor.

Moreover, Kapoor is the star and you’re never
in doubt about the foregrounding and primacy of male desire. As with many a
Bollywood hero, he starts off with more confidence than Gene Kelly and Errol Flynn put together and never
loses that astonishing inner belief. Yes he changes his avowed path at the end
of the film but his learning curve is hardly revelatory. Padukone gets plenty
of screen time in the first half even if much of it concerns the camera staring
at her heavenly face sporting increasingly confident smiles. When Bunny leaves,
Naina stays at home. When Bunny comes back she represents the beauty, calm,
wisdom and stability of family and of modern India.

Film fans, I DO
worry about myself enjoying such reactionary films – OK that’s a bit strong,
films that promote and naturalise ideas and ideologies that deserve critique, but then I
think of that golden age of Hollywood during the 30s and 40s. Astaire and
Rogers films were hardly a beacon of socialist progressiveness but that doesn’t
stop me loving them. Charm and beauty added to singing AND dancing goes a long
way in my book, especially in a world where Hollywood, by and large, has lost
the skill of combining romance and comedy. I loved Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani. I probably shouldn’t have but I did.
What’s more it’s a very different (and superior) experience to the previous
generation of conservative films like Kabhi
Khushi Kabhie Gham. The blokes’ clothes are SO much better.

Thursday, 3 October 2013

Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone is a melodrama. It’s themes, metaphors and symbols aren’t
subtle – Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) performs with Orca whales in Antibes and
has to have a below knee amputation after an accident. She scarcely knew who
she was before the accident but despairs for herself after it. Ali (Matthias
Schoenaerts) has just arrived in the city with his five year old son to stay
with his sister. Alain is a survivor - an insensitive bruiser who used to box,
and, as the film progresses, becomes involved in bare knuckle fighting. The
film is about how these two characters find themselves, self-respect, love, and
a measure of peace. It’s also the first great film of the recession. Audiard
sets his film in the workplaces and the small living spaces of the poor working
class of southern France. Everyone is trying to make ends meet; criminality or
destitution lie just beyond the next bad decision.

Ali and Stéphanie meet briefly at the start
of the film when, as throughout, he treats her with a mixture of kindness,
(insensitive) honesty and straightforwardness – though don’t underestimate how
unlikable he is for much of the film. After the accident, Stéphanie is lost,
but manages to reach out for help by to turning to Ali. What evolves, somehow,
is friendship and passion. So, why, and how, is it so good?

Audiard’s vision and technique should not be
underestimated. Much of the film breathes a kind of expressionism. Key scenes
are infused with perfect measures of sunlight or shade to give depth and
emotional resonance to scenes and images. He mixes this with a healthy dose of
naturalism, using a hand held camera to get us inside the small living spaces
and follow the characters around the urban environments. Like most of the great
directors, he knows how and when to use close ups and long takes (lingering on
faces and images longer than any you would find in much mainstream genre cinema)
to infuse the narrative with humanity and significance. Also, watch the “Making
of” documentary to see how Audiard’s flair and vision is completely bound up
with his collaborative way of making films. His team of people tackling
difficult technical problems and aesthetic nuances are remarkable.

Audiard is one of the greats of modern
European film-making along with Michael Haneke and Claire Denis (and yes
possibly, probably, Ken Loach too). Of all of them Audiard is the populist and
the one with greatest range – just look at those films: the quiet comedy of A Self-Made Hero (1996), the romance of
Read My Lips (2001), the forlorn,
angry The Beat That My Heart Skipped
(2005), A Prophet (2009) and then Rust and Bone (2012). Whilst full of
praise, (legendary) film critic David Thompson wonders if Audiard tries to be a
little too entertainingand too often suffers
from a mild case of sentimentality especially when trying to tie up endings.
He’s probably right, but for most of their running time the films bruise you
with their hard, uncomfortable truths, indelicate passion and lost souls.
What’s more he elicits stunning, often extraordinary performances from his
actors every time; or is it perhaps that, like Woody Allen, he has the uncanny
knack of choosing his actors perfectly.

I almost think that Rust and Bone shouldn’t work and I know that for some, the last ten
minutes will cast a sentimental shadow over what has gone before. BUT,
Cotillard and Schoenaerts are brilliant and the film makes me want to believe
in their characters and fills me with a kind of longing; that people learn from
each other; that redemption is possible no matter how dully we inhabit our
lives from time to time; that it’s possible to find a balance in the world so
that straightforwardness wins out; that our drives toward superciliousness and
being judgemental fade away, and that emotional honesty, between adults, can be
refreshingly simple.

Wednesday, 7 August 2013

Most of the characters in Drive were psychopaths; some
people want to believe that Driver (Gosling) starts off a reasonably nice guy
and descends into a violent hell as events conspire against him. Director
Nicholas Winding Refn plays a clever game however; in the first section he
gives us the likeable, charismatic superstar Gosling and shows us him falling,
with his childlike grin (watch those smiles again though and see if you detect
how disturbing they are – isn’t there is something cocky and smug about him?)
for a normal likeable young woman and her son. The scene in the diner dispels
the illusion however. Driver, confronted by a past client threatens to smash
his teeth down his throat. He is already used to violence and is ready to use
it; and use it he does.

More than anything
Drive is a critique of and rumination on noir – not just the Hollywood noirs of
the 40s but the violent existential crime thrillers of the 60s and 70s like
Point Blanc, The Getaway and Le Samourai. In most of those films it was usually
possible to retain some kind of sympathy for their protagonists, not least
because the best of them starred some of the greatest screen presences ever –
Mitchum, MacMurray, Marvin, McQueen, Delon and De Niro. It was much easier to
believe in the fatalistic romance of noir because lots of the violence was
hidden and the pathologies of the protagonists were obscured or softened. In
Drive Winding Refn doesn’t really allow us a way out. Gosling plays Driver less
as a man and more as a hollowed out child and, Winding Refn seems to be saying,
if you don’t acknowledge the emptiness, brutality and desperation of this
world, you’re lying to yourself; or reading my film the wrong way.

Now imagine a film
with many of the same preoccupations but stripped of any consolation (well,
perhaps that’s overstating it: Kristin Scott Thomas is ‘stand up and watch me’
astonishing and Winding Refn’s direction takes us to the far reaches of the
avant-garde film spectrum). Imagine a film where ALL the characters ARE
psychopaths without any fear of confusion. Gosling was laconic and reticent in
Drive; now he’s virtually mute. His character’s horizons don’t reach far beyond
sex and violence as the dream sequences make clear. As a man he is a spent
force; damaged beyond repair by brutality and madness. Gone too is any sense of
excitement – this is a slow film with all audience expectations deliberately
denied. The fights are seen in middle distance using a fixed camera so that you
are forced to watch with detachment. Humour is absent (except for the scene
where the policeman Chang tortures a bad guy and I’m not sure it’s meant to be
funny!) and there is no one to root for – Chang is the vile Old Testament God
and Mai is barely a character at all.

Or were you secretly rooting for Gosling’s
Julian?

Maybe you can. One
of the most important differences between the two films is that Julian has a
past (we know nothing about Driver’s past remember) – and what a brutal fucked
up past it’s been as his mum Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) makes clear in
every scene. This is part of Winding Refn’s challenge to us – especially the
liberals and socialists in the audience. Aren’t we supposed to understand,
forgive, reintegrate, someone like Julian? It wasn’t his fault after all that
he’s been brought up in a family of mobsters and psychologically (and, the film
hints, sexually) abused for most of his life. And it IS Ryan Gosling don’t you
know and bless him, he’s not prepared to see children murdered. And yes that could be
remorse we can see at the end of the film? But is this shell of a human being
worthy of redemption? Could he ever find purpose in life?

I doubt it. The
most he would manage would be some kind of medieval, religious, self
flagellation; forever damned.

The trouble with
Only God Forgives is not that it isn’t interesting – it is. I might go as far
as to say it’s fascinating. I’ll watch it again. The trouble is that watching
it felt like an intellectual puzzle to be solved. The obvious contrast is with
David Lynch. Lynch is also a stylist who wants us to look into the nasty,
hidden parts of society that we try to ignore, but his films grab you, draw you
into the darkness and drill down into your subconscious. Winding Refn’s work
just doesn’t have anything like the metaphorical richness of Lynch’s films.

Drive and Only God
Forgives instead need to be compared alongside the great crime and gangster
films: films that that compare and contrast the psychoses of criminals and
cops; films that examine and deconstruct the romance our society holds for such
people; films that comment on their canonical forbears. As such they are well
worth your time. However my instinct is that there is an emptiness at the heart
of both films that won’t stand the test of time.

Tuesday, 6 August 2013

Park Chan-Wook’s Vengeance trilogy is famous
for its violence and for moments where it seems to deliberately set out to
shock - as when Oh Dae-su eats a live Octopus in Oldboy. Fair enough, for some it’s just too much; for others the
violence is without purpose or too bound up with a celebration of machismo; for
others there is a strain of unacceptable nihilism that runs throughout the
trilogy. Lots of the criticism aimed at Oldboy,
especially in the US, made reference to its postmodern superficiality and it is
perhaps unsurprising that Tarantino was the President of the Jury when Oldboy won the Grand Prix at Cannes.

Still, watching them again, a number of
points stand out: first they differ markedly (and remarkably) in tone – Sympathy is stark, spare, ominous; full
of dread and anxiety. Oldboy makes
you feel uncomfortable in different ways especially in relation to its sexual
politics. More than the others it relies on plot surprises to ask the audience
to re-evaluate and reassess. Lady
Vengeance, with its Baroque sensibility, is almost optimistic in comparison,
whilst its multiple characters, slightly confusing flashback structure and its scheming
heroine ask you to make comparisons with Elizabethan revenge plays. Second,
they’re incredibly serious investigations into what it means to choose violence
and revenge and don’t baulk at exploring all the moral and psychological consequences
of those choices. Third, though the plots concentrate on individuals, the films
are aware of (Korean) society, class, inequality and injustice – not always
profoundly aware, admittedly – but enough to give you a sense that you aren’t
being asked to consider violence and vengeance as free floating concepts. Fourth,
and maybe this is too obvious, they aren’t optimistic films. Chan-Wook wants us
to have a good look at the way ‘ordinary’ people descend into brutality and
barbarity – as they do (let’s be honest), on a regular basis. Finally, though a
few moments of the violence ARE thrilling, most of it is just shocking: instead,
the cinematic pleasure of the films come from their formal coherence, their
stylistic and aesthetic invention, their weighty performances and their
discursive nature. Otherwise there are no easy pats on the back – Chan-Wook
wants you to be uncomfortable, ask uncomfortable questions and stumble for
satisfactory answers.

All three
films make you question repeatedly who, if anyone, you have sympathy for and
whether you should be feeling that sympathy. And they make you feel that these are
important questions. That’s relatively
rare in modern cinema.

In
Chan-Wook’s hands, revenge is also a tool to probe questions around
individualism; revenge is defined by self-absorption and narcissism after all. The
dilemmas of the various protagonists may have societal roots and triggers but
their responses are defined by desperation, loyalty, romantic (and familial)
love, instinct and learned behaviour.In
Sympathy there is something almost
fatalistic about the characters’ actions whereas the latter two films allow the
characters a little more space for reflection and choice. Oh Dae-su and Lee
Keum-ja learn (or are pushed into confronting) what their actions might mean:
“When my vengeance is over, can I return to the old Dae-su?” asks Oh Dae-su
with what will turn out to be the most extraordinary dramatic irony.

Watching the
films again has only made me fall for them more than ever, especially Oldboy, but it’s still Lady Vengeance that I find the most
extraordinary. Yet, it gets mixed responses with critics unhappy with the
editing and the complexity of the structure, and with the way the film seems
split, tonally, into two distinct halves – the first somewhat jokey and cold;
the second much more serious and involving (see esp Clarke in Sight and Sound Feb 2006). Elsewhere Philip
French, in The Observer, sums it up thus: “While not an especially edifying
experience, it's one of the most exciting pictures of recent months”. I don’t
think he means exciting like the Bourne films are exciting or at least I hope
not. It is exciting in terms of its verve, imagination and seriousness. And
he’s wrong too – it’s full of intellectual and moral purpose. It asks questions
of me I’d rather not think about and elicits sympathies I don’t particularly
want to acknowledge. Indeed the film risks allying itself with right wing
ideologues in trying to pose the questions so sharply.

It’s also
incredibly moving.

A final word
on Oldboy’s sexual politics, as I’m
sure some viewers will find it too problematic. It’s hard to discuss without
giving spoilers but it is fair to say that the denouement, with all its
revelations, allows you to reappraise some of your earlier, uncomfortable
impressions. But is that enough? I doubt it.

Obviously,
if you haven’t seen the three films, I’d recommend them wholeheartedly and I'd recommend you try and watch them in fairly quick succession so you can compare and contrast. I’ll get on to some
of the other great Korean films of the Noughties another time.